Oracle Blog

Blogged by David Comay

In My Reflecting Pool

A year ago today, the realization of something that many of us at Sun
had pushed and wished for finally came true - the open sourcing of the
Solaris
source code and the creation of the
OpenSolaris Project.
On that date, I
wrote
about one aspect of OpenSolaris that I had been working on for a number
of years, but what really was even more exciting than the technology
being released was the possibilities for the future.

Reflecting after a year, I see a tremendous amount of progress
including accomplishments in areas, such as the
selection of a source code management (SCM) system,
which I dared not hope to be complete after one year's time. Many of
the changes that have taken place the past year represent fundamental
changes in the way Sun does Solaris development and though the
OpenSolaris community has a long way to grow, everyone should feel good
about how much has already taken place. And the fact that there are
already four distributions based on OpenSolaris including
Schillix,
BeleniX,
NexentaOS,
marTux
as well Sun's own
Solaris Express
is a reason to celebrate.

One of the areas of OpenSolaris that I was fortunate to have worked on
the past year was with a team working on a proposal on what the
OpenSolaris development process should look like. The team was led by
Teresa
and I was asked by
Andy
if I wanted to contribute to this effort. The team consisted of a
number of people both within Sun and outside including
John Beck,
Rich Teer,
Al Hopper,
Stephen Hahn,
Ed Hunter, Joe Kowalski,
Keith Wesolowski,
Casper Dik,
and
Bill Sommerfeld.
Although the
development process draft
that we eventually published does look in many ways like the
Software Development Framework
used within Sun for its product development, the process by which the
proposal itself was developed was entirely organic. The team initially
discussed what the scope of the proposal should be and examined the
high-level requirements of an operating system such as OpenSolaris.
These design principles and other
fundamentals
were something that was always kept at the forefront when we then
examined other open-source projects including
Apache,
FreeBSD,
Linux,
NetBSD
and
OpenOffice.

After reviewing other open-source projects and their development
processes, we brainstormed over the steps necessary to take an idea
from conception to realization, again taking into account the guiding
requirements discussed earlier. One very important notion that weighed
heavily on our discussions was that of "shrink to fit", where steps in
the process can be reduced or even eliminated when it makes sense. The
result is a fairly streamlined process that is meant to handle both the
introduction of large pieces of framework into OpenSolaris as well as
the simple bug fix.

The draft was
released
last November and we received many insightful comments from the
community. I would definitely encourage others who have not read the
draft to do so and provide comments to the above thread or on the
OpenSolaris
cab-discuss
forum.

As exciting the first year of OpenSolaris has been, it seems obvious
that the coming year is going be even more so. And as impressive as it
is having a hundred community integrations into OpenSolaris this first
year, I suspect that we will be seeing a far higher number in the
coming year along with the introduction of some large scale projects
where the community will be playing an larger part in the design,
implementation and integration phases.